The Bill Simmons Podcast - Kawhi in Flux, Embiid’s Next Team, Jaylen vs. Advanced Numbers, and a Mini-Mailbag With Joe House

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Joe House react to the news of the Raptors putting the Kawhi trade on hold until after the Aspiration investigation finishes. Then, they take a deeper look at the Jaylen Brown trade and why the Celtics decided to let him go. Finally, they discuss Joel Embiid’s availability in trade talks before answering some mailbag questions. (0:00) Intro (2:49) Kawhi trade to the Raptors on hold (8:44) Jaylen Brown’s advanced analytics (45:59) Are the 76ers looking to trade Embiid? (01:02:20) Mailbag Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Joe House Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo Brought to you by PayPal. Learn more at paypal.com The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit https://fanduel.com/playwithaplan to learn more about the resources and helplines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The Bill Simmons podcast is presented by PayPal. We're also brought to by the Ringer podcast Network. I put up a new rewatchable is on Monday night. We did Ali, Will Smith, Michael Mann, our ninth Michael Mann movie. That was me and Chris Ryan and Ben Lathen. Next movie we have, it's the 30th anniversary of an Ed Burns movie called She's the One. That is a very important Gen X movie. And we've been talking about doing this forever.

So it is me and Sean Fantasy because it's a Long Island movie and a special guest who's not on the podcast too often. So we are doing that. That is on Netflix if you want to watch that one. And then the next movie we're doing after that is Hitch with Will Smith, which is also on Netflix. So there you go. You can find this podcast on Netflix. If you do, Netflix has my list. If you just click the My List, every time I have a new podcast, it will pop on to your Netflix.

algorithm in a much more exciting way. So I wanted to pass that along. I also have a podcast coming. We're going to go live on Sunday on Netflix. Not sure of the time yet, but stay tuned for that. And I think I'm only doing the Sunday podcast, probably taking a couple days off next week unless something crazy happens, you know, like Kauai Leonard's trade being postponed, which we're going to talk about in one second with Joe House. House and I, we talked about Kauai at the top. We talked about Jalen versus analytics. Could Joel Embed be traded and wouldn't anyone even want him? And then we did a whole mailbag and all of that is coming up next right after we take a break and hear Pearl Jam.

This episode of the Bill Simmons podcast is presented by PayPal. You know a clutch move when you see one, a no look pass, a buzzer beater, big steel. Well, imagine if your wallet could pull off moves like that. That, my friends, is PayPal. Right now you can find offers from hundreds of brands like Sony. Allbirds and Viator and save offers before you check out. Earn unlimited rewards. Plus, you can add those rewards on top of credit card points.

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we just finished our podcast. And then as we finished, Gahou told us that there was breaking news of the NBA. It was the Toronto Raptors saying that their trade for Kauai Leonard is on hold. According to the statement, they said the NBA League office informed us that as a result of the ongoing investigation above the Kuivers, we would assume the risk of any potential outcome of the investigation impacting Kauai. In light of this, we will wait until the league's investigation is complete. the rafters remain eager to bring Kauai back to Toronto and look forward to a swift resolution for our players,

our organization, our fans. So we actually talked about this in the podcast people. I'll just leave it in so we can hear because conspiracy bill came out. What does this mean? I have no idea. I mean, the league office is doing informing. The league office is responsible.

This trade happened a week ago. How much more time do they need? What are we getting to the bottom of at this point? point. But this seems to indicate that Kauai could be suspended? It suggests that there could be Kauai consequences. This is assonine. What is the fucking league doing? The league is responsible for the outcome and whatever pronouncement it wants to make. The teams are permitted to do business. If this was a condition that was going to be. But why didn't the league say,

you're not allowed to do to trade Kauai or do anything until we finish our Right. Right. Why didn't the league do that? You tell me. What is the point of this communication now? This is ominous. Finish the fucking investigation.

I know, but it's an independent. July the 9th. Who cares? There aren't any more witnesses to be interviewed. There aren't any more fucking documents to be reviewed. It's been an eight month to investigate. Months after months after months.

September? You know how many lawyers and how much fees is being jailed? generated. It's a money grab. Baby doll thinks it's a money grab. Who thinks it's a money grab? Well, this is the first time. All of us thought the quippers were going to get penalized.

This is the first time it feels like Kauai might also be punished in this. There's no other way to interpret this. That also really seems out there because the collective bargaining agreement gives the league the right to punish a player for agreeing to an arrangement with a sponsor, where the sponsor says. Well, but this means there's more stuff that maybe hasn't come out yet. There's something that's something disincentuates that Kauai could be suspended for a year, six months or whatever, and the team didn't know that when they traded for him. Because they couldn't assume the risk of any potential outcome.

It's like the Raptors would assume the clippers risk. No, you're right. Clippers are fine, but now that they have Kauai, Toronto will have to be penalized. Like, this has to be Kauai related. But what, you're absolutely right. What is the scenario under which Kauai is individually culpable for something that, that is outside the bounds of the league's rules on this? What did Kauai and is this the, they want to do something to Uncle Dennis?

I don't understand it. What could he do? Like if the sponsor was Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola has an agreement with the Clippers and has an agreement with the league and does sponsorships and says, we also want you, Kauai Leonard, to be a spokesperson for Coca-Cola, and we're not going to make you come do anything. You know, it doesn't work out. The circumstances don't work out.

We can't, you know, it turns out you couldn't make any of his appearances. Can they? The player can be punished for that? I think they should go further. I think they should postpone the Jalen Brown trip. I think all transaction should be postponed until we get to the bottom of this. Jalen Brown is back at the Celtics.

That would be incredible. I'm rooting for that, more than anything else. I'm really shocked by this. I'm dumbfounded. Capital D. D. dumb. This makes me think that there's a full Quipper statement as well. I hope it says the league can go fuck itself.

The Quippers acknowledge this from Mark Stein, our buddy, the Quippers acknowledged that the Kauai investigation is ongoing, but we expect the trade to be finalized following its conclusion. So was Adam sober, like on vacation last week? Where was he? Why didn't he tell them, you can't trade Kauai until we finish the investigation? Sorry, everybody.

Right, no, shit. Does he not have the day that free agency and, you know, the transaction market opened up on his calendar? As usual. What the fuck? Why are we talking about this on July of night? Last week, getting offers for our 12 NBA Europe teams and didn't realize Kauai was traded. Toronto.

My bad. The league has advised us. We have to assume the risk. This is. You assume the risk. It's your risk. It's the league's risk. Eat a dick.

Not assuming shit. So we could have. Toronto and the Clippers make a deal. Why? So we could have Garland, Wogler, Kauai, Rui. my guy Yonik. Keep Kauai. Cancel the trade. Keep them. But yeah, they got two firsts and two swaps. It's a good deal. Wow, House. All right. We'll find out what happened with this. But in the meantime, let's go backwards an hour and 40 minutes to the rest of our podcast. This episode is brought to you by Accenture.

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All right. We're recording this on Thursday morning, about 10 hours before the big DeBanza Peterson, Summer League game. I love how every year we forget that Summer League doesn't matter. It's one of my favorite things when everybody gets carried away with all of this stuff. It matters because it's our first look. And it's our, you know, there is genuine appropriate excitement. I will say that at least here in Washington, I encourage everybody to keep expectations

in the appropriate level. Like, let's just be calm, cool, and collected about it. remember poor Alexander Sarr when he came out and went, you know, over 15 in his first summer league game. Not a bust. And whatever happens between Peterson and DeBanza tonight, it doesn't set the referendum for the rest of their careers. And by the way, we knew Peterson was incredibly talented and the most talented guy in

the class. That wasn't the reason he went second instead of first. There were red flags last year. And, you know, I thought he was one of the whole. hardest guys to peg ever. But man, you watch the Summer League games like, oh, no. I've been taking a lot of bullets. I've been catching a lot of strays. He's already stopped starting. House, the Wizards, Peterson. And Peterson's going to look great tonight against the Wizards. Peterson's going to look. By the way, he might just look great. Like, he might have just gone

to the perfect team. Might be the right city, regular organization, right coach. And he might be awesome. And everybody knew that that was very possible. All right. I have a whole agenda for us today. Amazingly, we're doing more Jalen Brown content, but not for the reasons people think. We are also going to talk about Joel Embed and whether he might be on another team next year. And then I have a whole mailback for you. But I wanted to talk, the old guys have been watching all this advanced metrics stuff coming out of the Jalen Brown trade. And you and I have kind of strad of the fence.

I'm a little more advanced metrics friendly than you, but both of us are you know, I test common sense guys as well. Just deep diving everything from this Jalen trade for the last 10 days, I just can't believe how bad he looks in the advanced metric stuff. And it's almost like I find myself going back over all the games I watched and all the Celtic seasons I took in and all the playoff games and just wondering myself, did I get this wrong? And then I landed on, no, I don't think I got this wrong.

I think there are some reasons for some of these stats. you haven't come on and talked about this yet since the trade. Since your colonoscopy. Since the colonoscopy. Yeah, by the way, thank you for that. Success. I'm glad we raised awareness for colonoscopies, by the way. We've talked about a bunch of times.

Go get one. Not that hard. As many as you're allowed to get, I recommend them. But yeah, so I test going big picture on as you're watching the dialogue about this, where everybody has now apparently decided. Jalen Brown is actually not an efficient player. There's, if he's your number one guy, you don't have a chance to win the title. All that.

Like, where do you stand with all this? I mean, right out of the box, I reject the framing. I don't reject analytics. I think they are great. They are super helpful. It's information. It's really interesting way of, you know, trying to measure guys against one another when their situations and contexts are so disparate.

Like, how can you measure Jalen Brown's effectiveness against? Jalen Brunson's effectiveness. Well, there's some ways to slice it and dice it. All of that is fine. I don't reject any of that, but context is super important. Remember, this Boston Celtics team was in a transition year. The anticipated number of wins. What was their win total?

Was it 41? Forty-one and a half. Yeah, right. So that's where, you know, the markets were anticipating. It was hard to say what kind of. season this team was going to have. And then through the combination of Joe Missoula and the front office, I give him credit, and Jalen fucking Brown, they won 56 fucking games because he is that guy.

He is that dog. He took the standard and made all of those guys. I'm going to say this without trying to disrespect the rest of the Celtics roster in the most recently completed season. But he took a bunch of bombs. to 56 wins. And you know how I know they're bums? Because he got rolled right the fuck out of the playoffs

as soon as you got into a situation where you were up against a proper test in terms of a team with talent at all levels. And, you know, the front court for the Boston Celtics this entire season was the development of Nemeus Keita. Wonderful. Great job. A plus, plus, two thumbs up.

Shireman, Hugo. Right. More Pritchard. Development. development, development, great. That was the point of the season. And then Tatum came back earlier than expected. And immediately, remember, again, it was just two and a half months ago.

Boston was forecasted as a potential team to not only make the Eastern Conference finals, but to make it to the NBA finals out of the east right when the playoff started. They had the second best odds because the expectation around what they were capable of with Jason Tatum and Jalen Brown, a track record of 10 years, a full decade of those two guys kicking ass when they're on the floor together. Yeah. A slew of Eastern Conference finals, two NBA finals, and the NBA championship that Jalen Brown was the MVP of.

So I don't mind at all going inside the box and saying, well, how do we sort of measure the impact going forward? But here's the thing that I ask you, and I wonder about for Celtics Nation, why did they give up on this season? How can you come into this upcoming season when you've done the thing that was most important, which is bring in Mitchell Robinson. Yeah.

An absolute rebounding miracle of a man single-handedly contributed that rebounding role to the Knicks to vaulted them right to a championship. You bring that in. Your most dire need, you've addressed it with a guy who's absolutely, And then Healthy Tatum. And Healthy Tatum.

And we know we have 10 years of evidence that those two guys plus Mitchell Robinson plus whatever else the front office could do. That's a team that looks to me like a possible Eastern Conference finalist, possible NBA finalist. And we punt. Why did we punt? Why did the front office give up on this Celtics team? You know, there's a lot to unpack here.

You gave me a lot there. and I do want to circle back in the advanced metrics, you're talking about overreacting to a bad result in the playoffs, which I think Minnesota did too. Minnesota did that lamello trade. I talked about it when it happened. They were banged up last year, right? Edwards got hurt right before the playoffs wasn't 100%.

Thief Finchenzo got hurt during the first round. I.O. got hurt. And I just feel like they decided, well, we don't have a chance anymore based on what the playoff results were. have to take a big swing. I don't agree with it. It's funny hearing people remember what they remember about the Philly series, which basically came down to three games, game two, game five, and game seven.

And in game two, Brown and Tatum actually played pretty well. It was the guards, I think Pritchard, White, and Vucebich were like two for 20 from three in that game. And we just couldn't hit a shot. The pace was off. Philly was, I think, 19 for 39 from three. They stole the game. It's fine.

they're up 3-1, they go into game 5. They're up double figures in game 5. Do you remember what happened in the second half of game 5? I don't. Embedd fucking killed them. Oh, yeah, that. Embedd killed them, and it came out of nowhere. And it was this was this crazy thing that got introduced during the series,

where all of a sudden you have 2003 MVP, Joel Embed, just looking like Joel Embed again. in the second half of that game, he shoots seven for ten and four for four from three is 18 points and maxes five for eight and they just play better and they steal the game, right?

Game seven, Tatum doesn't play. Right. Tatum gets scratched and they do that crazy starting lineup to whatever. And I don't know, I didn't mind the way Jalen played in that game. I thought the reasons they lost the series because White and Pritcher didn't shoot three was well, the Vucevich thing was a terrible experiment.

I don't hang that series on Jalen at all. So anyway, they overreact to it. You asked why they did this. And I've talked to a bunch of people, and I know I've talked about it on the pot a bunch of times, but it feels like they felt like there was no going back after Jalen had a taste of being the guy in the team last year. And that whatever they were going to do with this team this year,

with his contract, he wasn't going to get the extension from them at the end of July. and did this have a chance to actually go sideways? And I think whether you agree with it or not, I think they evaluated this as like, this isn't going in the right direction. The Tatum Brown thing's been weird for two years. There's been a lot of dialogue about that, about can you play with somebody you don't get along with?

I don't know if they got along or didn't get along. I know they didn't hang out, but I also know that they had an unbelievable nine-year run together. Yeah. That they played more playoff games together anybody, they won a title in 2024. I just don't think this was like a kid Mashburn Jimmy Jackson situation.

But what I do think is that they were concerned that there was no going back with Jalen. And that after being the guy and now, hey, thanks for being the guy, but now Tatum is going to be the guy again and we're not going to give you an extension that they thought it was going to go sideways and they got ahead of it. Well, that's a confession. That's a confession.

That means, you know, for all the accolades, aides that we've heaped on the Boston front office for a long time. A move like this suggests that they can't, you know, present and maintain peace inside the locker room. That there is an inability to manage your personnel. And it's not, they're not new personalities. It's not a managing thing, though. You're talking about two guys making 60 million a year.

And the coach who's making 10% of that. combined. Like, his voice is only going to go so far. This is a league over and over again when the superstars run the league. And if the two superstars, though. But if the two superstars about, so this is, the voice thing's important because obviously Chisholm bought the team. He's only in the team for like a year and a half.

I do wonder if, if Wick was the owner of the team and hadn't sold, I do wonder if he would have handled it differently. And I'm not saying he would have been the hero of it, but would he have been like, wait a second. Let's all get together. We got to figure that, really, this is, that's one piece. And then the other piece is, for the, for the restaurant concept.

But that is exactly what was called for. I mean, people murdered me. Who are these people? I enjoyed it so much, but, you know. I was trying to be funny, but it was also true. Like, get these guys in a fucking room. That's right. Everybody get in a room and have out whatever you have to have out.

This is a team that, that's set a stand. with those two guys as your focal points of getting to the Eastern Conference finals and possibly the NBA finals every year that the two of them arrive to the playoffs healthy. And this year, it was forecasted to be a potential repeat really out of nowhere. There was no reason whatsoever for that Boston team with 56 games. And it really was a dopey Philly series. There's never been a situation like that.

where somebody just comes back, midway through the series, plays well for three games, basically, and then immediately goes back to not being an effective player again, and then they get swept by the next. Well, it was also the kryptonite of the Boston roster, because the Boston roster was an in-development roster. It wasn't anticipated that it was going to be a team that was going to win between 55 and 60 games

and win its division and make a long run into the playoffs. They did. They were achieved by 50 games. Nobody in the front court. That's why. Embed had the success he had. They couldn't defend him. Well, and we couldn't make threes either.

So the old guy conversation, there's two things going on. The advanced metrics are bad for Jalen. And this is something I've been trying to wrap my head around for a week. I mailed you, I mailed you. There's 85 guys ever. I went on Stadhead. Thanks to Stadhead, by the way. I've always enjoyed it.

Great job. There's 85 guys ever who averaged at least 28 points a game with a 30 usage rate. And you could put all these different stats, like Win shares, Vorb. Borp is like, it's not nothing. I don't, like the thing is, I kind of like these stats.

I don't think they should be the determiner of a player's value. But it's interesting, Jaylen's win shares were the worst out of all 85 guys. And we're talking about like, World Be Free, 1980, Iverson in 2005,

Mark Aguirre in 1984, like, and he's the worst. And then you go to Vorp, which is also not nothing. I don't mind looking at Vorp. Jalen was third to last and the only two seasons worse than him in Vorp were 2010 Carmelow and 2007 Carmelow. And you look at some of the names in this list house. And it is interesting.

It's all these high usage forwards that never were able to really be. You can never build a finals team around him, right? Dominique, Adrian Dantley, Mark Aguier. Carmelo, Alex English, World Be Free, you could even build a first-round playoff team around him, Donovan Mitchell now. But these guys that you could throw a big burden on them

and you could have regular season success, but as the levels got higher, that recipe didn't work anymore. And I think that's basically where we landed with Jaylon last year. We talked about this. Like, let's go back to just us playing pickup basketball a million years ago. At some point, you have five guys. One of those five guys needs to regularly create a good shot for everybody else, right?

Just start there. Jalen was the only guy who could do that on this team. Pritchard once a week. Oh, he wasn't an offensive engine, though, Bill Simmons. I know. You say create a good shot. I don't know. The stats don't support that.

Jaylor Brands like, oh, is effective field goals down. Well, maybe partly because every time they played anybody, the entire defense was like, we got to stop Jalen. He's going to take 16 twos. He's going to get to the line. Let's throw two guys. guys on him. Let's trap them. Let's attack him when he goes to the rim. He had a big bird and he played 71 games and this is what we've talked about over and over again. Durability, consistency,

and can you be the hub of something bigger, which he did last year? And I can't accept the advanced metrics telling me otherwise because I watched this season. Well, not only that, again, I mean this as respectfully as possible. He dragged a bunch of fucking bombs to 56 wins. Like, he was a really important part in terms of setting a standard. Those guys, the development of Gonzalez and Shireman and Peyton Kempkinson stepping up and Kada and like this is a team like roster-wise that was going to win 41 games. That's what made sense. That was the sensible outcome.

And Jalen fucking Brown was like, no, I don't accept that. I'm going to go out. And again, let's also give credit to Missoula because the game plan also called for a kind of, you know, radical, although not that radical under Celtic circumstances, way of approaching every game. But they, they ceded nothing. They conceded nothing. They went out and played their ass off every night.

They gave it all every night. And he took on the biggest challenge every night. Yeah. Yeah. There's a reason that they all were able to collectively elevate. One guy took the lead. He took the lead. He was the leader.

So I don't care about the efficiency numbers. I don't give a shit. shit. That doesn't help me understand anything about contextually what happened last season. Yeah, there's burden and gravity and there's some things. But he also played his ass off on defense, by the way. That's why the MVP conversation had him featured, you know, Will Bond said with, you know, a month left of the regular season that Jalen Brown was his leading contender. Now, whatever you want to say about. Yeah. They were first an offensive rating for the entire year

and they ended up second. Who else were their elite offensive players in this offense? Tatum played 16 games, right? Pritchard, who I love, and I actually think Pritchard could go up a level next year if there's more shots thrown his way, but I didn't know whether Pritchard was showing up night to night.

He would have games where he just stunk, you know? Sure. That's who he is. White was bad shooting-wise all year, even though there's great advanced metrics for him. And then everybody else, you didn't know what they were getting. I mean, that tells you, there you go.

The advanced metrics for Derek White offensively were very good. They're always good with him, though. He sucked. He sucked. He sucked. He sucks shooting. He lost his confidence. Yeah, he sucks shooting.

I'm talking about his offense. Yeah. But this is the thing. As a shot, as a, remember all the money we made, betting on his, the over for his blocks every night. Oh,

that will they, awesome. Yeah, Fendell finally wised up to that. But part of the reason his shooting was down because he had such a big load. I think he wore down as a season went along. And that's another thing. Like,

Man's Metrics with somebody like Jalen. And it could be Jaylen, it could be a bunch of people. But the night to night showing up, playing 36 minutes a game, I watched him during the course of the year guard, Kate Cunningham in the last five minutes of games, Luca, Kawhi. Right, right. Pick a guy. SGA, they threw him on. And he would accept the challenge.

And I don't know. I just feel like in basketball, you have to have one guy that's like, well, at least we have this guy. They have that guy, but at least we have this guy. We're probably getting 29 to 32 from our guy tonight. And when you don't have that, you're not going to win 56 games. So with that said, his plus minus, if you go through his career, it's like shocking. I think he might be one of the great advanced metrics outliers in the history of the league,

if not number one. Every single year, the Celtics were basically better with him when he wasn't on the court. And I don't have an explanation for that. And I'm not going to be like, oh, the stats are wrong because obviously they're not. And I was talking to my dad about it because my dad, you know, pre last season, Jalen went up a level last season. Like he really like got better as a creator. And, you know, his, I thought he had less turnovers, even though it doesn't reflect that he had the ball way more. But my dad pre last season, they would have these two five minutes sections when they would take six minute sections. They would take Tatum out.

and Jalen would get to run the offense. And my dad would either go to pee or go get a pop barn because he's like, I can't stand this. I hate when it would be like going to a concert and, you know, you're going to see the Rolling Stones. And it's like, oh, now we're going to play the Keith Richards song. You're like, fuck, can't you play Start Me Up? It was like everybody goes to the bathroom. So that was there. And it always felt clumsy when Jalen was in charge of it.

But last year it was not that clumsy. I'm just telling you. Yeah. I think it's fine to look at, you know, over the. the course of the career and, you know, point out these vulnerabilities, these frailties to his game. Like it was a flawed, durable player. Yeah, but we know from the outcomes what kind of impact he has on winning.

Like the outcome of him. The 2012 title. And being the MVP of that team. The MVP, the finals MVP. Well, whatever, whatever. I thought, I thought Jason should have won that. Enough people saw enough to believe that he earned it.

Yeah. Well, I wonder, like, do they look at that season where they superpowered the role players around them, which is impossible now? But they just added Porzengis and Holiday. They had Derek White already. They'd Pritchard as a bench guy. Al Horford was still there.

And then you have this double forward combo in their mid-20s still. Tatum and Brown. And both of them were just a lot going down. Hill shooting threes and maybe that they felt like that was the peak. They talked a lot about the, in the press conference about the usage, the usage of the two guys together and the salary cap. And I get it. The argument falls apart when you also tried to trade for Janus and Janus and Tate were

going to be 70% of your salary cap. I will never for the rest of my life understand why they didn't wait to see if this deal was available until September, October. Because I think Philly's saying, you're saying. Yes on September 1st, on September 17th, on September 30th. I also feel like whatever happens with Jalen and Philly can't, you can't retroactively go and fit that to your opinion of this trade because I don't know if this is a great situation for him going to this Philly team that's Maxie's team.

And then when Embed comes back, everything revolved, I just don't think his stats are going to be the same. He's going to be a- Who cares? He's a winner. They're going to win. They're going to be good. I love every sixers future I'm in.

The idea of them is 8 to 1 to win the East. Okay, I'll have a little taste of that. They're 4 to 1 to win the Atlantic Division between behind the Knicks and the Celtics. Well, I think they're going to be motivated this upcoming season. Obviously, the wild card is, do you get 40 games out of Embed? But those three guys are really going to help each other. I think it's going to be a really good fit. Like putting good players on the foot, Edgecombe and Maxie and, and Jalen together, that's good.

That's not going to be, it's going to work. I'm not worried about that at all. These were other things I was saying heading into the 2018-19 Celtic season when I picked them to win 70 games. Kyrie, Brown, Tatum, Hayward, we're going to be unbelievable. Well, there is one flaw. But you could feel it right away. And this is, you know, this is what you and I have loved about basketball forever.

It doesn't always make sense. Like sometimes you can have a team like that last year's Celtics team where it's like, we have one guy who can consistently create a shot. We have a bunch of other guys. You called them Bums, which I let it slide. I think they were young guys, role players. Okay. Whatever.

They were all guys that couldn't be top three guys on a team except for weight. But they figured out, they figured out how to make it work. And we've seen this over and over again in basketball. There's been teams where the pieces fall into place. With Philly, you have a lot of star, power and a lot of money. You have Embed, who we're going to talk about after the break. It's just, you know, I would just be careful with that one. Is it an on-paper team or is it a team that's actually going to play well together? Because Paul George, whatever you say about him

at this stage of his career, definitely knew he was a complimentary player and could kind of pop in and out. But he certainly popped in and out. I don't know if Chalin wants to pop in and out at this point. Well, if you're measuring it by how many games did Paul George play? He certainly popped into and then popped out of the entire season. Might have popped some things into his body too. Yeah, so when we talk about like the usage rate and some of these advanced stats, it prompted me to go in this huge deep dive. And I did my book from basically 0709.

We didn't have a lot of these stats that didn't have access to them. And there's stuff that like I would talk like I was looking at Steve Nash. who I had, I forget where I had him, but like in the pyramid, I think I'm going to move him. Okay. But I think I had him like in the, somewhere in the 30s in the pyramid and now he was in that cluster of point cards. Steve Nash ran the number one offense in basketball. You can go back now to through basically to the mid-90s and look at all the on-off stats, all the offensive ratings, everything.

He was the number one offense every year from 2003 to 2010. two last two years in Dallas, his first six Phoenix seasons, no matter who was on the team, they didn't have Amar Estademeyer for all of 06, didn't matter. They were still number one in offense. They were number one in 08 with Shaq,

when they made that weird shack trade. They were number one in 09 in 10. And another Mark Cuban masterpiece. Well, but then you go and you look at the on-off stats for Nash, and his, when he was off the court those last two years, they were better without them, allegedly, according to the stats, that must have been one of the reasons they let them go.

Anyway, my point is, like, I do think some of these stats are great. I think Jalen might just be an outlier to some of those stuff. High usage guys on a team that's not that good. That probably should have been like a 42 to 45 win team. And for whatever reason, this type of player was able to pull 10 wins out of the regular season, but in the playoffs, it becomes harder. Yeah, well, especially with the roster construction that the Celtics had this most recent season. I just think it's a dumb way to try and capture who he is and the impact on the franchise.

The only aspect of it to me that has a kind of like, okay, I can see this vibe to it, is the extension. If he was really going to get bent out of shape about the extension, if there was something that happened in those conversations. Yeah. But here's the problem. the Celtics front office did not prepare its fan base in any way, shape, or form for anything like this. It was either Janus coming to the Celtics to join Tatum, or we're going to run it back. Or we're open for business.

We're going to run it back with J.B., and then we'll see what happens over the course of the season. And by the way, running it back with J.B., or at the beginning of the season, at least, it's going to be a bunch of wins for the Celtics because Jalen Brown and Jason Tatum together with the cast of characters and inserting Mitchell Robinson into it, they were going to win a bunch of basketball games. And I think that should have helped overall.

Like some teams, you know, circumstances change as you get to the beginning of the season. Some teams start underperforming right away. And the best you can do is... Right, you just wait until December. Who's unhappy? Right. Yeah. Paul George in July is not the answer.

Like, we have proof. We know for sure that a GM took a big, gamble on Paul George and that GM is not in the league right now. It was, I'll tell you this, it wasn't the answer right after my colonoscopy. Um, yes it was. You know who's the best, the best example of the kind of Jalen season we're talking about where the advanced metrics actually kind of liked it was Iverson. Interesting.

His O one season where, you know, his usage, everything is like just highest possible caliber. and he was on the court was plus 5.7 and his on-off was plus 4.1, so it was around the same. Now, there's also reasons for that. They built that entire team around Alan Iverson. Every decision they made, every player they put next to him

was to help hide him on defense, a physical team that can protect him and basically just shoot a shitload of shots and go nuts. You know, and then we get to the playoffs that year and he was basically even on the court in minus five when he was minus five overall in the playoffs where he didn't have a lot of good games and they got a lot of foul help

when it gets Milwaukee and all that stuff. But it is possible to build around a high usage. More likely it works out like it did with Jerry Stackhouse on that 0-1 Pistons team. Remember when he averaged like 30 a game and they were 32 and 50? That's usually the way it goes. Yeah.

What I thought the touch point, the reference that that was closest to what I might have imagined for the Celtics team was Russell Westbrook the year that KD left. Right. And he averaged his triple double. That was the 1617 year, right? Yeah. They won like, I'm going to say 48 games, something like that. I think they won 46. Yeah.

Maybe it was 48. But they got, they won one game in the playoffs. They immediately got, you know, just. And it was similar. Remember Westbrook won the MVP because there was that one game in the weekend when he was just awesome in the last three minutes. And it was like, all right, fine. You twist my arm.

You have it. But the point is Jalen could at least be somebody that you could, whether the advanced metric stats loved it or not, he could be the fulcrum of a team that could win in the mid-50s if you put the right types of players around him. I don't know if there's a lot of guys like that in the league. You know, I agree. By the way, as great as Kauai was last year,

Um, the durability thing is just not going to be there with him in the same way. You know, and I also wonder, I can't remember if I said this before, but if you're playing 71 games and you're going hard in all those games and you're really trying to guard and do all the stuff that Jaylon was trying to do, you're not going to be 100% for all of those games. Right. Whereas like the we've, we've seen some guys where they can play the 55 to 58 games and take a couple breaks during the season. Look at Paul George. Paul George took 25 games off. came back. He was 21 a game, the last 10 games of the season. Then he was really good in the playoffs, partly because he took 25 games off in the middle of the season. So I will never

understand why they didn't wait. And I think I'm more confused by the advanced metrics than I was before this trade. Because I don't, I don't really have an explanation for how they're worse when he plays and they were better when he was off the court. And I think it's an advanced analytics team that was like, this is, this is multiple years now where this has been the case. What multiple years, though, like, the years, they were making it to the Eastern Conference finals, the years they were making to the NBA finals, like, there's some alchemy there. There's something about the chemistry experiment that's producing more good results than not good. Like, you know, these far runs deep into the playoffs with him as the second most important player,

and it's fine casting him that way. That tells me a lot about his import to the situation. Yeah, they're basically treating him like a TV show where it's like, this is ER season eight. We don't really need to pay our number two leads $60 million anymore. We can get some other actress and bring her in and basically get the same ratings. What's your reasonable forecast for the Celtics' this upcoming season?

Oh, I'd be shocked if they weren't in the mid-50s again. I think Fandall has them minus 135 for the 50 plus. There's more injury risks this year with the team. No, no, no. There's 49 and a half on Fandul, and it's not minus 135 to the over. Oh, well, it was four days ago. 50 plus wins was minus 135. So that's different.

I'm going to try and pull it up here super quick. They have the Celtics. They opened up, Fandul opened up. They put 10 teams out with the actual overunders? With over unders. And the Celtics are at 49 and a half. And I guarantee you the over is not. minus 135 at the moment.

Well, the thing is, Mitch, assuming Mitch can play 60 games and play 20, 25 minutes a game, 20 to 25 minutes a game, he's so much better. 60 is a lot of games for Mitchell Robbins.

I get it, but he's just way better than what they had last year with Garza and Busovich. Could not agree more. That's why I thought that he should have kept Jaylen Brown. And then how many games?

Tatum is in the Jalen Brown spot and has been a first team all-MBA guy four times. So you'd figure there at least a little up there. They lose Simons and replace him with Paul George. And then you have who goes a year older and Shireman's a year older. More Pritchard shots, less minutes for weight so he can be a little more efficient. And I don't understand why they wouldn't at least be a 54 to 55 win team for the regular season. That's why.

Injury. They have more injury risk than they did last year. Yeah, no question. Tatum. They sure do. Mitch. Paul George. Right.

But the thing is, couldn't they play Paul George 45 games? Oh, so it's the exact same price. It's minus 135. I got it wrong. Boston at winning 50 is it still at minus 135. And the over is over 49 and a half. That's what fans will set it for. Right.

Is it minus 135. So that's it. I mean, I would think about the 55 for that because he figured Detroit's worse. We'll see with Philly will be better. East is tough. There's only one team that took a step backwards, in my opinion, And that's Detroit. The Pacers are going to be playing, you know, to win this season.

The Wizards are playing to win. Now, that doesn't translate. But I don't think Charlotte is worse. I like what they did in terms of their machinations this off season. I like what they did long term, but this for the season itself, we'll see. Well, we'll see. I like Orlando this upcoming season with a functioning head coach. And if Franz Wagner can play 60 games.

Well, but look, I mean, you know, they were forecasted to have over 50 wins last season. You would think that Lanna would be a little bit better. Right. The East is tough. The East is going to be a bitch. There's only three teams that suck. I got to say the single funniest thing to me about the Jalen.

The, and listen, and it's been discussed a little in different places. But I think Jaylen's side and his agent definitely, definitely sabotaged a couple of possible teams. There's no question. There's a couple teams. Like who? I think there were a couple teams that they were like, yeah, he's not going to be happy if he goes there.

Name names. I think there were teams that backed off when they got the feeling. With trading him at this moment now, especially, is like there are not a lot of teams that can take on a $57 million

contract. Like, it's just under the way this, this is the unforgivable one. Go ahead. Explain to me at a million years why the Brooklyn Nets wouldn't have traded

Michael Porter's expiring for, and three of the first they have for Jalen Brown. what possible answer do you have for this? You are asking for, you know, the solution to the Jesus shroud. This is the functional equivalent. Like, how can you explain? There's nobody to explain it.

I'm Joe Si, and I call you. It's a phenomenon. Yeah, we have a chance to trade. Michael Porter's expiring. A pick down the road. We have like a Houston pick and something else. And we can get Jalen Brown. Wouldn't your answer be like, what the fuck are you waiting for?

Take the trade before they pull it off. The phenomena in the, this is one of those phenomena in the universe that has no explanation. You just have to accept it. It's not like to have another max guy. You can't even blame like this whole, are the Kaplan backwards? Brooklyn put this on the table? No, I'm saying Boston thought they had a chance to pull something off with Brooklyn. And at some point in the higher levels, I talked about this a week ago.

It got squashed. They decided they didn't. They were interested in Jalen Brown. Which, oh, okay. I'm saying. So at the Brooklyn. Well, Brooklyn deciding against it makes perfect sense because they make no sense whatsoever.

Because you can't make any sense out of what Brooklyn is doing. The next one, the title. Who am I selling to Nets fans next year? Please come see Brown, our rookie before he gets hurt. Julius Randall. If I have Brown and Julius Randall and a bunch of shooting and young guys, like, At that point, I'm not not interesting. Right.

But yeah, they turn that down. It's really bad. They don't need more teams. They just need to move that Brooklyn team. We're going to take a break and then we got to talk about Joelle and Bede. Whether life serves you an ace or an unexpected backhand, the high protein yogurt, Oikos Pro, is there to feed your strength and help you turn every challenge into a smash. Oikos Pro helps build strong muscles and support muscle recovery with high protein and contains no

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Joel Embed, 57 million this year, 63 next year, 67 in the final year of his deal. I mean, we're doing the worst contracts draft all over. I mean, this whole podcast is us is Paul George and Joel Embed.

Absolutely amazing. Jalen's 57, 61, and 65, and Maxi's 41, 44, and 46. And the cap's going backwards. This whole thing where the cap went backwards has been, I wish I had been more focused on it heading into the draft and free agency. Like, this is nuts. It's $6 million lower than they projected it for this year.

I think next year it's going to be in double figures. And by the time we get to the last year of the decade, I think it's going to be like $25 million less than they thought. So this is the most, yes, I didn't mean to interrupt. Well, no, it's just when they did the Jigland deal a couple years ago, I was like, whoa, we had to pay the whole 304 with, Tatum, too. Like, why did we do that?

And then everybody, and it was just Celtics. Every team was like, Caps going way up. Like, that contract in a couple years. Like, and I remember doing pods about, these guys are going to be making $75 million, and it's going to be like they're making $35 now. Well, the cap didn't go up because of all this local TV stuff.

And it is one of the reasons that drove the Celtics trade. And if I'm the Sixers, and I have $114 million for Embed and Jalen and then I said the Maxx thing going up, who's the guy I want to build my team around? And I have Vijay Hedgecombe down the road. It makes me wonder, do I need to have Joel Embed around? I think they're going to trade Joel Embedhouse,

and I think they want to. And I don't care if this gets aggregated. So I think he's available. I think teams think he's available, and I think Philly has been pretty careful about saying, we're so excited to build around Embed, Jalen, Max, and Vij. You haven't really heard a lot of that. I think it beads available.

And the question for me, House, would you trade for Joelle M. Bede? And if you, if you, if the answer is yes, how much would you give up? Would the Wizards trade for Joel M. Bid? Pick a team. I'll give you a bunch of them. Yeah, I'll give you the Wizards.

That would be Davis for 58.4. It's a straight shoot. I think Philly would have to make a second trade to do something with the first apron. They'd have to, a couple of cap mechanics, but my guess is Philly would have to throw picks into that trade to get you to take a B. They sure would.

Would you be interested in that? No, sir. No thank you. I'm all set. So no thank you. Yeah. I think I agree with you. If you're Milwaukee, would you think about Miles Turner, 26, 28, 29 next three years,

and Kuzma's expiring for Joelle Embed? To do what? Milwaukee stinks. What's the point of adding a guy that plays 40 games, a season at 60 million bucks a year? So that's a no. That's a hard no. Okay.

They need to stink. If you're Brooklyn, would you think about Michael Porter, just straight up for Embed? Who knows? You have to ask the Jesus route. You're in charge of Brooklyn right now. Oh, I'm in charge.

You're in charge of Brooklyn. Yes. You would trade Michael Porter's expiring. for three years of Embed. No, definitely not. You wouldn't? No. Michael Porter's expiring is worth a lot.

That's worth a lot. I could have Joe L.M.B., the 2003, I think that was the year he won, 2020, 2023 MVP on my team. How many games is he played? Who's on my team? What's say you moved to Brooklyn? Who are you going to see in the Nets this year?

Nobody. Julius Randall? The same as ever. It's the Nets. I'm not going to see the Nets. Here's the one team, I think. Dallas. run by Musai,

U Harry. Long, long standing relationship with Joel and Bid. Okay. I think would be the one guy that would maybe be a little more favorable

about rolling the dice of them. And the other thing is they have contracts. They have Gaffert at 17, 18, 19, PJ Washington, 19, 21, 23, and Clay at 17.4. And that can't be the trade. They'd need a third team. so you would have to bring Milwaukee into it and send Turner and Kuzma to Philly,

you would have to send and be to Dallas. That's not terrible. And then you would have to send the Gafford, Clay, PJ. You'd need some sort of third team, it would be something like that? If you were Dallas, would you think about it? No. Wrong player, wrong timeline. So the conclusion we've come to is that Philly is going to have been.

Joelle Embed on their team next year? The situation that makes sense for him, honestly, is a team that is very close to winning the title. And that team looking at, you know, it would be a Western Conference team to me in the first place. And it would be a team that feels like this, we can bolster our Wembee stopping power with some number of games first. from Embed in the playoffs.

Okay. That's what makes sense to me. Okay. What's that team? Well, the contenders are Minnesota, Denver, and Oklahoma City. Those would be the teams that I think, you know, have a legit chance. I don't look at anybody else in the West. Why not?

They, they had a- I'm not doing that if I'm Denver. They had Valenzhenius as the backup to Joker. Yeah, but you can't have a 57 million. Denver's out. That's that Denver's ridiculous. They have to trade your mom- for him.

I'm talking about... Minnesota, I don't think can because... And you're saying they have to trade Jamal of Murray for him. Two giant big guys with no point card? Minnesota, I don't think can do anything because it's a second apron. I think it's too complicated for them. Even the Gobert bit, they can't... They couldn't be Gobert.

I don't even know if they're allowed to package players. That's another thing that's so stupid about the league right now is these, you know, all these restrictions and regulations against being able to trade. Was the third team you had? Shout it. San Antonio themselves could acquire him. Oklahoma City, though, was the third team. They're not doing that either.

Okay. It would have to be a team that's like a slightly, slightly desperate, you know, like... I mean, it could be Houston, but Houston doesn't do anything that makes any sense. So they're just going to waste the end of KD. Forget all the teams. Would you even consider taking that contract down in a million years?

under like desperate kind of circumstances is what you said can golden state fit him is the expiring jimmy butler uh an option here house now we're talking now we're talking yeah we can get go and say it's fuck it we'll we'll get they had mbeed cur coached him in the olympics um he played very well for cur he really tried hard for that u.s team and b did and you use them is a luxury. The problem is if you're wrong, you've, you've ruined the last bullet in your gun for Curry. Golden State's an interesting one, though.

Yeah, the bigger point is... What if LeBron's there? What if LeBron helps? The other one is, what if Detroit says, yeah, this is actually more interesting to us than Endurance Sign and Trade. I don't think they would do that either. Okay. But yeah, there's just not a lot of teams. I don't hate Detroit. I really don't.

I don't hate Detroit. I do think the idea of Cade and B has a kind of logic. let me do this exercise in a slightly different way. Give me the over under of games by year and Bede plays the next three years. Thirty nine and a half per year? Oh, you're saying yes, yes, per year. Right. So that's one. So if his over under was 39 and a half games next season, would you bet over or under? Under. Yeah, see, this is why Philly's not going to be able to trade Joel and Bid. I didn't have to sign him to that extension. If the next, if the next

lost the title. Oh, that's a good one. There's some towns and Bede starts to become, but inside it went the other way. But yeah, the next, the biggest mistake Daryl made, I think of this decade was not selling high in Embedd, much like the Celtics just sold high on Jalen Brown, which I think for different reasons. It wasn't just only the not selling high. It was also the extension that was not called for, was not required.

he had a murky foot situation. That extension is the most unforgivable extension in all basketball. All right. So we think Joelle and B will stay on Philly, even though I don't think they wanted to stay. That was, that's where I look forward to them being asked this in a press conference, be like, I don't know where this stuff's coming from.

We love Joel. We want him back here. I don't, I think they want to have the team built around Maxie and Vijay and Jalen Brown. And if they could get out that contract, they would. on joel ambide golden state if they could just man it and they'd have draymond they have yaxel

and curry and basically and they have porzengis right that have a couple luxuries and basically the goal would be can we just patch together a regular season and get into the playoffs as one of the eight seeds and then kind of see how it goes for two months kind of fun i'm into it i'm into it it's kind of fun let's let's let's take a spin well the other thing that happened to poor gold state is i think they thought they were getting uh lebron and potentially ad and now it's pretty clear they were being used

by leverage as leverage in the uh as lebron goes back to cleveland but i don't understand what that leverage translates into like meaning what because the teams that are still in the running for him the sixers the heat he's going and cleveland the cleveland thing's done he's going to Cleveland. Okay. Come on. But it has to be... First of all, they hired his buddy's assistant GM. That was red flag number one. Red flag number two was they gave Donovan Mitchell that giant extension for no reason.

Do you want to pay Donovan Mitchell $75 billion three years from now? Well, here's the thing. That was they were paying off Donovan Mitchell so he doesn't get mad when we got LeBron. You're going to be shouting this from the rooftops. We need to tell all the hoops heads out there, all the NBA lovers. It's not just that the salary cap... is going in the wrong direction. The percentage of what Donovan Mitchell's salary represents to Cleveland is going,

it's going to be nearly 40% of the cap because of the way that the cap is moving. You're right. If the cap goes, is it any sort of danger going the other way? It's an incredible miss by the people doing the math. At the time the collective bargaining agreement was negotiated, and this second apron, this hard cap was dropped into this. situation, they fucked up how much money is going to be available year over year in a material way. So we are living in an era now, and you've said this, and we just got to keep telling

all our Hoopshead brethren, there are going to be a lot of deals done where it was done for money, not done for basketball reasons, but for salary cap reasons. Two things might flip this. Let's hear it. Expansion? being able to dump, they could make the expansion rolls, whatever they want. Okay. Right? They could say you have to take $8, $10 million and up players or however they want to do it,

but you might be able to get off one of these guys. The other thing is, and I don't know if they can agree. What's the timeline for expansion? Does it marry up with how much time is left on the Embed contract? No, the next couple years are going to be bad. I wonder, could they institute an emergency amnesty clause? Just make that part of like, they add a year to the CBA. You're like, we'll add a year to the CBA, but we need a couple things back, including we're going to bring the Amnesty Clause back.

You and I, the Amnesty Clause. The players don't want another year of this CBA. The players hate this collective bargaining agreement. Well, they should, you know, they should blame themselves because they, they had the reps that signed up for it. The Amnesty Clause brought us more joy than just about anything. It was the Allen Houston. All of it. Just every time they had it, it was so funny to watch teams just pay people to go away,

including your team with the famous Andre Blatch extension, which was my favorite all-time greats. The extension that turned into the Amnesty Clas. Yeah, I don't, maybe there's not an Embed team yet, but that's, I feel like that's going to be a story. By the way, he's been pretty quiet the last couple weeks. But I feel like there's something there with Dallas, too. seen a welcome to Philly J.B. from Embeded yet. Have we seen that? Maybe he's done it. I don't,

I'm not. So you're just, you, there's no situation where you trade for him unless you were super close to a title and you had a situation like a Jimmy Butler type contract. A thousand percent. You wouldn't do it like if you're Brooklyn and be like, we have Joe Ambide, we have a star, come see Joel and Bid. How many games can you tell your fans he's going to show up and play? If he only plays 40 games, then come see him for 20 games. I don't know. How did Philly do it the last five years? Not well. Their fans are are besides themselves. The counter on Embed is you could say, I don't know, his knees looked actually pretty good.

He had all these other weird injuries and things happened that what if he's just healthy? And I'm trying to talk myself into it for somebody. Phoenix was the other one. I couldn't even figure out Phoenix is salary cap. But it just felt like a Phoenix. They would do it. Yeah, it felt like a Phoenix could move. There'd be no doubt. I mean, the Miles Bridges thing is fucking. bananas. Why did they acquire Miles Bridges? Well, I think, did they have to do that. Did he go to Isbias College?

Yes, he did. Seems like that could be an explanation. All right. Well, watch. Embed watch is on. We're going to take, oh, I had another thing for you. Teams that have their own picks in

2007, we're going to do a mailbag in one second. As far as I can tell, it's only 11 teams. that just have their own pick in a way that we can understand like, oh, they have their own pick. Sacramento, Memphis, Chicago, Washington, Portland, Orlando, Charlotte, gold state, Indiana, Boston, and Detroit. And I think I'm right.

I'm not, don't hold me to it, but I think those are the 11 teams. And then there's a whole bunch of new picks, swaps, Houston has Phoenix's pick, Memphis has the Lakers, Brooklyn has the Knicks pick, San Antonio has, the Hawks, etc., etc. I think

they need to add this to the CBA 2 along with the Amnesty Clause. What? This is too confusing now.

Look at this document I have. New picks, swaps, and like, this is just a team. This is fucking, how did we end up here?

How did we end up here? There's two double swaps. And I don't even know if this is all right. Like, Brooklyn has Philly's pick, I think, protected one through eight next year, which they're not getting. So I guess it rolls over.

Clippers have Toronto's pick. The Celtics have this Clippers pick two years from now. That might actually be something. Well, this is, we can't do this because it's going to be. I just can't follow it anymore. The third week of June, 27, one through 30, somebody will be picking. There'll be 30 picks in the first round. They have to fix this.

Who the hell knows? I hate it. All right. We're going to come back to a mailback. All right. Some mailback questions. You can send them to BS Podcast 33 at email.com. Actually, speaking of what we were just talking about with Brandon asked about the repeater

tax as it run its course. Teams are treating the second apron as a hard cap. Can they just remove it? It was interesting. Stevens mentioned something I had been talking about on my podcast for years about how unfair it was that Tatum and Brown were guys they drafted that grew up in Boston became star players and then they basically, because of the rules, couldn't keep both of them and whether they should have stuff built into protected teams. And my argument was always like

after five years, maybe you get 2% off per year of the guy's salary for your luxury tax or your cap or whatever. You get some sort of benefit because then that would lead to more stability and fans knowing that they would have the same guy on a team for more than nine years. You're down with any of those types of ideas, right? Of course, yes. You have to persuade the ownership, the group that sits on that side of the table, that this is something that fans want.

And so far, they haven't been persuaded. It hasn't shown up in a collective bargaining agreement yet. Of course, it should make sense. AJ and Toledo says, the everyone wins penalty would be for the NBA to force bomber to swap the clippers for the Supersonics for free. He gets to be the hometown hero. in Seattle and run the team.

He leaves behind the Intuit Dome and the Quippers, which they then have expansion for and you get the L.A. Clippers and is an expansion team. And that's how everybody saves face. I mean, the more interesting thing about the bomber penalty and if there's going to be a penalty any of that stuff is they traded Kauai to Toronto. Who was the aggrieved party in 2019?

Toronto. Toronto. I mean, the stories are out there. about all of the extracurricular stuff that, you know, Kauai's camp, what was demanding. Yeah. So, and conspiracy bill. Those are out there.

Conspiracy bill tackled this in a mailbag a week and a half ago about, could this be the penalty where they just, Toronto just gets their picks back and we call it a day. But it is interesting that they've removed the one. So they get Kauai back, who apparently loved being there the whole time, even though he fled like it was the Amniville Horror House after that season. And everybody's just like, yeah, and we're just good.

So does this mean we're never getting a verdict or finding out what happened? Both, yes. There'll be a verdict, but for finding out what happened, the league is going to say we investigated it extremely thoroughly and we couldn't connect to any of the dots that suggests that there was, a knowing plan by the leadership of the clippers to deliberately circumvent the salary cap. It's a lot of circumstantial evidence. So you're going to say we couldn't connect any of the dots.

It doesn't look good. The optics aren't great, but there's no direct communication from anybody at Clippers' leadership to Kauai or to aspire that says, we're going to try and compensate you, Kauai, outside of the rules of the leaders of the league. We'll see how it goes. Jamon from North Carolina. Jamon from North Carolina wants to know why Phoenix isn't being talked about as a legitimate LeBron destination. He could be doing the 2021 Chris Paul with Devin Booker.

They have talent. They have flexibility. And more importantly, it's one of the country's best golf destinations. What more could he want? Intriguing. Here's the thing. Two answers. First of all, he's going to play golf. wherever he wants to play golf on whatever circumstances he wants to play golf. He doesn't, he's not tied to the locale, right? It would be, it's a nice to have for the locale to have,

you know, some golf courses on, on the days that he's actually, you know, there for home games. Right, because he's going to be at the road half the season. Yes, yes.

If there's time, stretches in the schedule, he can get anywhere. He has a private jet that will take him anywhere on earth and certainly anywhere within the continental United States. to go play golf when he finds room in the schedule. And by the way, if he needs a little bit of rest here and there, which certainly makes sense for him and for the team, then go take three days.

He doesn't need to play every regular season home game. And he won't play every regular season away game. He'll play some number. It probably makes sense for him to play. What do you think? 60 games? Is that the right number? He has every record.

This is why I still feel like, I mean, one of my predictions is, to coming true that he's using the entire month of July to milk this. And it's worked. And everybody with a podcast, every TV show has had LeBron segments. ESPN seems to write a piece every two days. I played brilliantly on that. I still wonder, could he just wait until December, January,

and just keep this going for six months and kind of wait for week 17 football season to strike? How many games did he miss at the beginning of the most recently completed season? The first 30? Yeah. Well, yeah, it was like 20 at least. Yeah, because of the sciatica. I got the sciatica. Got the sciatica.

Which is, makes sense. Fine with it. If he called you as his golf conciliary and was like, I'm picking my team, I have every record and I have four titles, I'm picking my team solely for the golf courses. What would you tell them? Golden State. It's an all-time no-brainer.

The proximity to the Monterey Peninsula. and Cypress Point. That means you get Cyprus, you get Pebble, obviously. You get the other bangers right there. Monterey Peninsula Club is super underrated, magnificent. Paso tempo is within a short drive.

And then right there in San Francisco, there is a banger after banger. San Francisco Golf Club, the Cal Club, where Curry belongs. Olympic is there. It's just, you know, there are a dozen of the greatest golf courses that Earth has to offer in that area.

Plus, L.A. is a short flight. So he's got all those. He has San Diego in that whole scene. He wants to go spend, too. He wants to go spend, you know, 48 hours at Band and Dunes down in North Bend, Oregon. You know how easy it is to get from a,

with a private jet from San Francisco's pitch. They're like, dude, you already won four titles. You're already, you're in everybody's top three for eternity. Like, you should have fun. Play with Seth Curry. Make this patch. You and Steph is the one making the pitch.

You're selling out arenas. You're going to get to play golf in every course. Like, what are we doing? Just come to us. I don't know what he's. The Cleveland thing, I don't really understand it. What do you mean? I don't understand how, like, if winning is the number one priority.

Yeah. I don't understand how you. win a title if you're playing Mitchell, Hardin, and LeBron as three of your five guys in four straight playoff series, why anyone would think that was going to work? It's a tough one. I think LeBron has to be in the hardened spot. And the only case I would say, like, why if he decided it's Cleveland, why it's taking so long is they're trying to figure out a way to get out of the hardened piece of this when they

had a wink, wink with him. Well, I thought they already extended him, didn't they? I thought they were still discussing it. Yeah, I don't think it's been announced. Well, they said they're working on the extension. Is it not been announced that the extension's completed? We've seen teams back out of stuff. Well, that's true.

We have seen that. Daryl morey is a liar. That's tough. That was tough. Poor Daryl Mory. Tough decade. No, he is not. The extension's not complete yet.

It is not. There's a lot of could-bees and maybes. Could-be three years, like all kinds of stuff. That's what I saw. It would be interesting if, If Hardin became the six man on the team, like he went back to his 2012 OKC. The problem with Cleveland is Kenny fucking Atkinson.

I mean, get grandpa, his smoking pipe and some pudding. And let him tell you how many games they won according to the Ouija board. Charlie sends in, it's supposed to be eight slices of pie for blame pie. I always do blame pie. I guess I had three slices in the last one, and he doesn't like that. Why?

It's illegal. There's no word, no need to have the word pie involved. You don't say, sure, I'll have 10% more apple pie on Thanksgiving. You say, have one more slice. And then he writes, I'm a depressed Celtics fan living in the Bay Area. He wants more explanations. So how many slices can be in a blame pie, at least four? Because you can have a four-slice blame pie.

You could, yes. But we had eight explanations for how the Celtics fucked this up. Did they apologize to their fan base yet? The Celtics? Yeah. They need to apologize. I'll say this. Because there's been some weird stuff going on online and people doing shitty things to Stevens

and all that stuff. Sports, anybody that does that stuff, I just don't get it. You can be mad about a trade, like whatever, but you start calling it. and as social media handles and stuff. I just think you've got to take a look at a mirror at that point. I didn't see any of that stuff. Yeah, it's like shit with Brad Stevens' kids. I did not all of it.

I did not ask that. That's horrendous. Let's keep it in perspective. We won the title in 2024. Settle down. I didn't like the trade either, but if you're going online to try to attack people, settle down. Keith Black says,

he thinks that Matt Frieser from the World Cup game is up there with the worst sports plays he's ever seen in his life. And he said his top five are J.R. Smith's finals brain fart. The Bill Buckner, Game 6 error. The Colts special teams play when they put all the guys on the right side

and then the snapper got overrun and the punter got tackled. The butt fumble and Chris Weber calling timeout. He thinks I should have a bracket with all the worst plays ever. That's too mean. The bat free's play was iconic, though. Yeah, and you have to separate

even that list of contenders. the stakes were radically different for many of those. Like the Buckner error is in the same class as Freeze because that's what was at stake. I don't know how I was going to freeze. Whatever, however you say it. I don't know how to say it. Buckner was just like a brain fart mistake.

The goalie having like basically an AYSO error for the third goal that you would see like in an under 10 game in Norco, California. I'm still reeling from that. I'm just being like in terms of like what was at stake and the horrible outcome is produced. Well, except for they weren't going to win that series, and it was game one. And they still, all it produced was them going to overtime.

They still could have won that basketball game. It didn't, the game didn't end on that play. The stupid, you know, giving up that goal, the game was over. That was it. What about Wemby Whippenoff Castle's back? Go ahead and put that in the list. You can put that in the list. The foul was worse.

The foul on him fouling. Brunson was worse. AC and D.C. says the Jalen trade is so interesting because of two elements coexisting. How lopsided and panicky the trade appears. How amazing Brad Stevens has been to things that don't, to things that collide. Well, he's been amazing as an executive. Yeah, I think so.

You like the Vuccovich, how that went down? That was a money thing. That was a money thing. And then hope. That was it. That was a money trade. That was not a basketball trade. Again, we have to keep telling the world this because that team was, you know,

trending in a direction where they knew the Tatum was a possibility. They had to save money or the team was going to have $300 million in taxes, which was unsustainable, apparently. So this is the expectation management that I'm talking about and why they should be apologizing. They should have said out loud that, you know, Jalen, as much as we love him and we'd love to keep him, we're not sure that's going to be possible. They could have said that at any point. They should have said that during the honest thing.

They could have said this at any point. I'm still not positive they were that in on Janus. They made one offer. You said that they were. They made one offer. They never made a second one though. It's so weird. Why?

Why didn't that? If you wanted to get a new house in D.C. And you're like, I really like this house. You make an offer. And then the broker's like, all right, well, they'll do this instead. And you're like, nope. I've made my one offer. Rather not have the house.

Usually you can make an offer in basketball, that means you're going to make another offer. But that's the thing. The Celtics are like, yeah, I'm good, but I don't want the house. It doesn't make any sense because it costs them Jalen Brown. Yeah. Anyway,

AC and D.C. and D.C. says, with something like the Luca trade, we could immediately just trash Nico Harrison and not worried too much about eating crow later. But because of how much most basketball fans respect Stevens, we have to entertain the things. thought that maybe we're the asshole here. Maybe he's far ahead of us on understanding the card cap and how to compete with one being

okay C and getting rid of Jalen. And then he wonders, has there ever been a bigger self-questioning? Wait, am I the asshole trade in the history of basketball? I did think about this. It's probably the Adrian Dantley-Marc McGuire trade. Okay. Because I think our reaction when that trade happened was, huh. Like they almost made the finals last year.

with Adrian Dantley, and Mark Aguier seems pretty unhappy in Dallas, and this is a pretty weird trade. Wonder why they did this. And then it turned out that won them two titles. Not saying this is going to turn out the same way. I couldn't think of any other examples, though. How quickly can they trade Paul George? What are the rules now?

How long do they have to hold on to them now? Before the season. Okay, they still, I didn't know if there was like if this was one of those trades where you have to sit on them for some period of time. time before he comes trade eligible again. I liked when New Orleans said they're not trading Tray Murphy. What are they doing?

Tray Murphy's going around everywhere saying like, yeah, I don't know where I'm going. I'm definitely getting traded. Talk to him. New Orleans and Brooklyn, the two most confounding franchises. Luke Hall and Melbourne, Australia. Love Melbourne, Australia.

He said after hearing your list of, oh, no, trades on the podcast with Zach, should we start ranking trades for Shock Factor, the same as earthquakes, like on the Richter scale. The Luca trade would be a 9.5, the largest ever recorded. It's true. You could factor it after shocks, tsunamis, and more for trade analysis. It's a 9.9.

Yeah, I would argue the Luca trade was a 9-7. I think it's a 10. That's like the end of civilization. Whatever the highest. I thought 9 was like your whole city's ruined at like eight and half or I. Yeah. So maybe the Luke is a 9. It was catastrophic.

until the league fixed the Cooper flag pick. I think a 10 would be like OKC trading Shea Gilgis Alexander for Kevin Herder, straight up. That'd be a 10. What about the Celtics trading Jalen Brown for Paul George? And two first round picks. Yeah, what about that? I think it's at least a seven and a half.

I would say so. The thing is, we knew they were shopping them. An untradable contract. You don't have much model. we've gotten off these Paul George contracts the last three years. What was the number one Washington Wizards Richter scale trade? Goops. Probably Mitch Richmond for Chris Weber.

That was pretty bad. You were so sad. Actually, you know what? No, it's not that. It was we traded Ben Wallace for, hold on, I know this. The guy from Orlando. Oh, God, I know his name. I'm sorry, I can't pull it right now.

It was a horrendous, horrendous. Yeah, because. And Ben Wallace went to Detroit and became a cornerstone, the most important player on multiple contending teams for them. So it was, oh. Ike Austin. Ike Austin. Yeah, I knew I could pull it. Tim Legler was in that trade.

Legs. What are how he feels about it? Ike Austin. I remember. Jesus Christ! I had a, I had the digital city column back then, but no podcast. you were just an occasional character in my column. I don't think you weighed in on the record on that.

But I know from phone calls, you were absolutely furious and upset because you were going to Wizards games and you were like, this guy, Ben Wallace, there's something here. And then they traded him for Ake Austin. God damn it. All right.

Now that Kyle Lowry is officially retired as a Raptor, I need a ruling. This is from Big Moe in Toronto. Is Kyle Lowry a Hall of Famer? six all-stars, one all-MBA champion Olympic gold. He will get a jersey retired here anyway, but we can't control the Hall of Fame. So as you know, I've been constantly tinkering with this pyramid list that I'll probably die and nobody will even know who was in it. I did have him on the extended honorable mention.

Second best player in a championship team. He did get 13-L-M-B-A-once, 2019 playoffs, 15, 5, and 7 and 24 games with all the defense stuff that he did. I wrote down, best love him on your team, hate him if he's on anyone else's team, Guy of Azera, basically, which is Lambeer,

Mahorn, Bruce Bowen, those kind of guys. He was probably the most talented of all those types of players. And everyone gets into the Hall of Fame. So the answer is he's in. He's in.

He's a great point. Anton Jameson's getting in. Did Antoine Jameson get in? Are you kidding me? Yeah, he'll get in. He has 20,000 points. He'll be in. my goodness, the NBA is something.

Jack M. writes, I've heard several takes on how Lamello will fit with Ant in Minnesota. But people aren't talking enough about the biggest problem with this trade. Lamella Ball will be living in Minnesota throughout the winter. The worst driver of our error is going to be driving on snow and ice for four months. This can't end well. You're going to have to call Con and Uber and get to Minnesota to protect Ant at all costs. We cannot let him get in an automobile with Lamello behind the wheel.

Now, people have been joking about this, but it's, it's, possible we haven't joked enough about it. Like he couldn't handle Charlotte. Charlotte's nice. It should be in his contract that he... Uber's only? Yes, yes. It does not an Uber, just a driver.

I think he likes driving, though. He likes driving that... Well, that means he likes crashing that crazy giant trucks. He's going to drive that giant truck and... Could be Fargo, too. Paul from Liverpool, UK. He said, FAAO conspiracy bill. Myopic News.

salary cap rules. Most talent leagues ever had not enough max salary slots, potentially disgruntled players. Adam Silver, now trying to rush expansion to open up more salaries and more max slots. What are your thoughts? I don't think they're related.

It did make me think that. I tend to agree with you. You think that the expansion will open up the cap, that the cap will increase because of the expansion? The cap won't increase. the ability to take 24 players and move them around and give some cap relief. And then if you're an expansion team, like if Embed's unprotected, the last year of his deal,

let's say they start in 27, 28 or 28. Let's say they started 20, 29. If you're Vegas, do you make Embed like one of your first picks in the expansion because you get Joel Embed for a year? Right. Okay. I get it. Except for Mir as in New York says, Why is no one in the media discussing just how terrible the Pelicans rebuild is going? Is it a retool, a re-poop? You tell me. Trey Murphy is still on this team.

Why exactly? Missy is suddenly feverishly untouchable. Derek Queen, he's untouchable. Herb Jones, they're letting content with just letting him rot away in a smoothie-coated hellhole. And what in the ever-loving fuck

is Zion Williamson still doing there? From the outside, it looks less like a plan and more like someone forgot to hit simulate on the rebuild. What are they doing? What is this team? Well, he forgot one. Didn't they just, didn't they just hire Jamal Mosley to be the head coach? They did. He's hot. He's coming off a seven-game playoff series. Well, he's hot because he was sitting on a goddamn hot seat for the entirety of that Orlando season. It's hot for the seat. It's in an inferno. Yeah, so they have in Brooklyn. I have no fucking idea what they're doing.

Dumars, when he traded McCollums expiring for two years of Jordan Poole, one of my favorite underrated bad trades of the decade. Bless up. So they still have Jordan Pool and expiring. They have Murphy, Herb Jones. They did not have the number of pick this year, of course.

They still have Murray. I don't know. I don't know what they're doing. That's a team. Who is it? Willie Green was the head coach? Yeah. It was just two years ago.

And they were on pace to win nearly 50 games. Of course, Zion got hurt. but there was a case to be made for Willie Green he was quietly taking a lot of that talent and here we are with them once again. They have some sort of some sort of swap with Milwaukee that I've, I just

yeah. It should be valuable because Milwaukee's going to stink, stink. It's either 27 or 20. I don't know. There's been so many things about, I have this document with all the draft picks and I don't even know what's right anymore.

But they have a swap with, apparently with New Orleans and Milwaukee, where New Orleans gets the best of those two picks. But that, yeah, that's right. I have that correct. So that's not bad. The bucks might not be good. They are not going to be good.

All right, a couple more. Watching upset. This is from Craig from Durham, North Carolina. Watching obsession, Did you see obsession? I didn't. Sign me up. You should, you can, you can pay-per-view it on whatever.

Okay. Watching obsession got me thinking about Kevin Durant. His career has all the tell-tale signs of a poorly worded wish coming true. That's the focus of obsession. That's the guy makes a wish. It goes badly. All right. After being eliminated in 2016, Durant made a wish to probably sounded something like,

I wish I was part of the best team of all time. He then got his chance. Unfortunately, after that, numerous injuries, foot on the line, sabotaged a couple of teams, never got the respect he wanted. That's an interesting analogy. He did get what he wanted. That 2017 Warriors team was, I think, the best team of this century. It's either them or the Owen Lakers in the finals.

Who do you have in that? The Warriors. Back-to-back finals MVP, right? Didn't he get it both years? Patrick wants to know if, is Jay, Brown replaced Cat now is this generation's 90-10 guy, where he's 90%'s good, but everybody dwells on the 10%. And he said, my other choice was Cat, but I think he washed himself of his sins with the last postseason. I think that's true. I agree. So Jaylen, that was that Westbrook column I wrote in

2012 about everybody has 10% that's not great. And some guys that's more glaring than others. And Russell Westbrook's was always the most glaring. And that's a little bit like what Jaylen's like. Cal from Ottawa. He said after watching Argentina scraped by Egypt got me thinking about messing in his relationship with his teammates. I think he has to be the most

number one most loved teammate of all time. Who else would you add to the list? Steph, et cetera, et cetera, he goes. For basketball, I think Steph and Duncan and Nash.

I'm glad you had Duncan. I agree with Duncan as well. For the last 25 years. And it seems like Brunson might be pretty close to those guys. Okay, good. Good, good, like that direction.

And then going backwards, I think Russell is probably the all-time example of this. Jerry West was another good one. Bill Wallham, when he was healthy. Wasn't magic, beloved? And magic. Magic, you know, he did get a coach fired there. He did get Norm Nixon traded. Like, I don't think it was perfect, but, you know, I think everybody loved to have magic on there, too.

David B. in the, from the Bay Area was listening to me, talked to Zep. about how I thought they needed a third card in soccer. In Gaelic football and hurling, in Ireland. Yeah. They have similar yellow and red cards soccer, but they also have a black card that works like a power play. Oh. If you get a black card, you're out of the game for 10 minutes

and your team's at a disadvantage and then you come back. Oh, I like this. I started to think about how this could play the NBA in other sports. You get technical foul. You're out for two minutes. your team plays five on four. I got to say, I did think about it a little bit. I think for soccer, like the Balagan Red Card,

if they had just given him the black card instead, he's just out for 15 minutes and you have to play one man down and then he comes back. I like that more than just this like do or die with the way it is now. My complaint with the Balligan Red Card was the next game. Like, even if he had set out the remainder of the game in which he'd committed that foul, I could have like kind of understood that

but kicking him out for the next game and having... You lose a game and a half. It was like the Wemby elbow. That's a joke. Who did Wemby elbow? Nazreed. He had to leave that game in the first half.

And then if he had also missed the next game, that's like you basically missing two games. That was possible because we wondered whether he was going to get a suspension and there was some discussion at the time around whether or not, you know, the league would step up that way. Daniel from Toronto wants to know are the Raptors, Forrest Gump, and his Kauai Jenny. They unconditionally and deeply love the person, but they walk out on you, cheat on you,

dabble in rotten, sketchy behavior when it all goes to shit, whisper sweet nothing, so you take them back and provide a net of safety and support for their final chapter. I guess Forrest Jr. is the 2019 title. You don't want to guess which. he said aspiration was. But I do like the analogy of Jenny Gump as Kauai. It's pretty good. The problem is,

I love you, Jenny. This next chapter of Toronto, it's not going to go well. Well, yeah, it ended with them getting married and her dying. Well, this is Jenny with AIDS. Right. She died. Yeah, for AIDS. Jake's never confirmed in the fore.

We did a whole thing at the Forest Cup. We think it was probably, yeah. I was there for that pod. It was in Washington, D.C. Jake Steiner said, if I could bet on when LeBron James plays his last professional game of basketball, what would the odds be for him to retire in 2028,

but after the Summer Olympics gold medal game? Oh, interesting. Two more years, plays for the Olympic team, does the last year as the farewell tour, and then the Olympics is the last moment. The question is, do you want 43-year-old LeBron James involved in our gold medal game? This is going to be the greatest Olympics basketball of all time.

Wow. This could be a house gets divorced. Olympics. I don't know how you don't come out for all the basketball for like two and a half weeks. Let's start with that. I mean, there's ways to do that and stay married, I feel like. Okay, good.

That was a good answer. But wow. I do love the idea of LeBron having something to do with that team. I really do love it. Huge fan of the pod. This is from Darren. I'm a diehard, miserable Mets and Nets fan. As a Mets fan, there's a Jalen Brown comp staring us in the face.

Pete Alonzo. Consistently one of the top RBI guys in the league, the metric geeks all think he's not worth the big money. And Mets let him go. Paid all these other guys. All them got hurt and missed time and can't do what Pete did at the player on the field. the only thing that makes this comp perfect is if the Celtics shit the bed

please know David Stern would have made this Janele Brown trade in a heartbeat that made me feel worse just just no question wait what does that mean David Stern would have made the Jalen Brown trade is the Mets guy yeah oh saying like as the Ptollanza oh Dan Fahey from the north end thinks that sliding doors for the whole Celtics trading J.B saga is not Tatum getting the Achilles injury, but Porzengis getting the mystery illness. Okay.

In the second half of 2025, which led to them not being able to beat the Knicks. Right. Tatum getting hurt in game four. Okay. And if Porzengis is healthy, maybe less minutes on Tatum, and maybe that is the thing we should point to. There's something to this theory. I do like it.

Andy, well, there's a couple more quick ones. Andy from QC, I forgot to mention this to you before the draft. Andy from QC, where's QC? QC Philippines. Oh, phenomenal. Hello, Philippines. He wants to know why we didn't make the DeBanza-Lem-Bias connection. And ironically, AJ was the one that made it.

I don't see it. I don't feel like they're, I don't see the comparison. But body-wise, I see it. Yeah. The way they present, I'll say this with no disrespect intended in any way, shape, or form towards my guy AJ. Bias was a much more physical player. And he could bully guys.

We didn't see that version. AJ might grow into his body and get there. But I mean, bias was a beast on the block. He was capable of, you know, creating advantage out of his sheer physicality. And AJ, again, he's not there yet. It's so funny that he was both our favorite college players,

but we didn't know each other yet. And you had even bigger ties to them because it was Maryland. I mean, I was going to games at Cole Fieldhouse at the University of Maryland. It's a top five NBA would have. It's brutal. Alex wants to know, he said, is basketball group chats having the following conversation? How many years would Seth Curry have to play to be considered the better Curry brother, like from right now? Assuming he maintains his Dallas level splits, 11 points a game, 43 percent, three points.

how many years before the sheer overwhelming numbers of his career become uninsaleable 40 more years if he was hooping at 85 does he not become the best curry had these people come up with these

it's amazing I was going to say poor Seth Curry fuck that he's had an incredible run yeah I'd still think he'd have to go to 85 Jay from Halifax Nova Scotia said the big fondue was a great wemby name but can't believe we didn't go with the choke monshore

Manure. Yeah, I saw the Choke Manure was out there. I saw that. I enjoyed it. Sacre blue. All right, two more and then we're done. From Chance in Oregon, your segment explaining Truck Robinson and World Be Free and a recent meal bag was my favorite five minutes of the pod this year. As a millennial NBA junkie, it's hard to get the proper sense of good, but perhaps not great players for previous areas. You can piece together YouTube, Wikipedia, a basketball reference. Please make this a regular segment. You list a whole bunch of guys. He said, dudes. I'm on the cusp of understand their careers. Pick a guy each week. You find fascinating. First guy he mentioned was Gus Williams. Yeah. And I'm happy to do 90 seconds on Gus Williams

with you right now. 1979 champs, best guy in the team. I have them as the unofficial playoff MVP for 1979. 26.7 points a game in the playoffs that year. He was fifth MVP in 82. He was all NBA once, second team all NBA once, 13 team twice. He played in the the 78 finals, best guy on that team, 79 championship, 80 Eastern Conference finals, and held out in the 80-81 season, which I talked about in my book. He had an agent named Howard Slusher who held them out because he was underpaid and basically cost him a really important year of his prime. He was the best point guard in the league house from 1978 to 1982. So this is why he- It's a five-year span and then Magic took it. Or,

Yeah, and the magic took the torch. Lost to history because this was the lowest point in the history of the league, right? In terms of its exposure, it's the place that it occupied, the league occupied in the American consciousness. So Gus Williams really lost to history. When you say a guy, the averaged, what did you say? 26.7 for the playoffs. No threes. There are no threes in the NBA.

Look at the scores of those basketball. games and think about how good he had to be in terms of inside, outside. And he was an incredible long-range shooter. Like, he would have been awesome with the three-point line. Yeah, he was, and then the next year he was 24 a game in 15 playoff games. That team was Portland should have been the best team of that era. And then Wong got hurt. And then Seattle basically was, and they couldn't, the real problem is Dennis Johnson, who I loved obviously, but I think it was a little prickly.

Gus Williams, they, it turned into a little bit of a, like a worse version of the Jalen Jason thing. Then I'm trading Dennis Johnson and Phoenix for Paul Westfall, who plays that one year and then gets hurt. And then Gus ends up eventually in your team for two years, Washington.

I remember. But it wasn't really the same version of himself at that point. But, yeah, I think, I think he was the best point guard in the league for a five-year stretch, which ain't nothing. And the games weren't on.

I think he's somebody, he was a classic bald guy with a beard, almost looked like an actor, could dunk on dudes, would do the thing where he would go hard to the basket and wait for the big guy to come challenge it and kind of wait a second, then dunk on the guy. I loved his game. He was one of my favorite, good basketball cards,

was really never on TV unless they were in the playoffs, though. That's the point. I don't think they showed Seattle era. That era that you just mentioned when we think of him as the best point guard in the league, he had 49.5%, 48.2%, 48.6%, 47.7%. From the field, this fucking guy, that's a bucket. That's a bucket right there. He's really good.

He was fast. Those were the point guards that are kind of have gone away now. Those John Lucas, Norman Nixon, Gus Williams, like these Kevin Porter, These fast guys to know how to run a team. Who is the closest to that now? Who is the closest to that? That's a great one.

Who is our closest in modern basketball? Like right now? Yeah. Because I, it's not Brunson. I don't think we have those guys. Because Brunson's a scorer. Yeah, I would say

because these guys, the impetus is more to score. But like, I feel like somebody like A-Cuff could be like that, but it's like the interests are more for him to shoot. Right.

But I'm going to, going to think on this. Who's our modern equivalent of Gus Johnson? Gus Williams. Williams. Yeah, he. Dennis Johnson. He was like a prototype, though, for those shooting point guards, basically. He was never like a highest guy. Anyway, I loved him. Go check out his YouTube. Last question for Brandon Richter. He said 20 years ago in the mailbag, I wrote to you about instances in which day drinking before 10 a.m. is acceptable. And he attached the image. Okay. From my old page two column.

Wow. Yeah, he made it. And he said, today the day before the next first ever ticket tape parade, I email you wondering if you need to update the list because this seems like a reasonable excuse for early morning beverage. I've been saving this email for you because nobody loves day drinking more than Joe House. Especially morning drinking. So when I answered this in 2005, I said, here's my official when it's okay to drink before 10 a.m. list.

Great. While attending football, tailgates, college reunions are the Boston Marathon. Okay. Three winners. Yeah, good. During your final two weeks of college. For sure.

Absolutely. Because there are many instances where you haven't gone to bed. He's drinking because you're drinking. I'm not going to bed. I just stay up. Oh, look, it's sunrise. Oh, let's toast to that. During any Vegas trip

or bachelor party or guys only golf outing. A lot of time where you lose track of time. The sun goes down. The sun comes back up. If you pulled it all nighter and haven't left a strip club yet, that's in there. Again, this is 2005 me. Sorry, I apologize in advance. Before any wedding that starts at 1 p.m. earlier, anytime your in-laws are visiting, any morning, any morning when it's below 10 degrees, this is a good one. I don't know how I came up with this. Big list. If you're dating an actress and just attended a movie, premiere during which she had a graphic sex scene with someone on a 50-foot movie screen. In 2005, who could have been?

I don't know how I came up with that. While living in any town in Canada, that's farther than 75 miles from Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, or Vancouver. If you've been writing for a late-night talk show for more than two years, I think that was a joke about writing for Jimmy's show. If your name is Jack Nicholson, before your fantasy football draft, if you're trying to get the ball rolling,

so some of your other buddies get plastered. I actually used to do this. There's always one guy who got married too soon and falls for it. And then I have a mean Vin-Baker joke that I'm not going to repeat because he actually had issues. It was way meaner in 2005. What are the other reasons that I didn't put in there? Well, you touched on it briefly. You said the ticker tape parade.

Well, the ticker-ta parade goes in. But really, many rounds of golf, many, many, many rounds of golf. Like, you know, like a bloody marriage. on the golf course or a Bloody Mary as you head over to the first T, that's a pretty tried and true staple. Like that really lands for sure. I had two more that as we got older I thought of. Okay.

And both involved Bloody Mary's. Good. Because I wasn't really a Bloody Mary guy in my early mid-30s. The Bloody Mary the next day when you're hungover. Yeah. I just think is important and somewhat life-changing. And I think you might have even introduced me to it. You were my wife.

You're the two suspects. Yep. And then on the plane. Oh, the great call. The morning, I didn't sleep enough last night. I just want to have one drink to get me a little bit more tired. So I can sleep a little bit. Nice little bloody Mary and then I get a little sleepy.

Or it's the rev up to, I'm going to this destination. I want to be loose. I'm going to start drinking now. To loosen it up. The 6 a.m. flight to Vegas. cross-country and you start drinking on the flight at like 10.30. I'm on vacation. Vacation starts when my ass is in the plane seat. Can I bring you some champagne? Yes, you can. Well, there's also better alcohol now that they have like, my daughter drinks this, I forget what it's called, but it's

bottles and it's iced tea and lemonade with something in it. There's a lot of those out there. Yeah, she likes one of them. High noon, surfside. Surfside. Yeah, yeah, surfside. That's what she like. Surfside's very good. But people have those and they've, feel like they're not drinking, but they're actually drinking. Yeah, they're definitely drinking. Definitely. Nice one of those over a cup of ice. That's a drink that I'll drink on the golf course at 8.45 in the morning. Oh, I've just played seven holes. Let me get a drink. You're most of your day drinking and rebuffs around golf and some sort of golf thing. Yes. Before the round, during the round and after the round. I don't understand how you're able to play golf when you have drinks in you.

I mean, first of all, I suck. So that's one piece of it. But is there a point where you feel like you're getting better and then you get worse? Sometimes it does create, you know, the taking the pressure off, whatever you're sort of feeling about your game up to that point. There's an element of that to it. And I mean, everything's within moderation. Let's be real. I'm not out there, you know, trying to make walking up the 18.

fairway shit face. That's not the goal. Well, plus it's hot. You got to be careful. Can be hot. More, yeah, got to be careful. Don't want to end up, you know, having the ambulance come to the Mexican restaurant patio because I was out there for five hours drinking a dozen high noons. Trying to avoid that. Try to avoid that. Forget about that one. All right, house. Have you been enjoying bed in the World Cup? I mean, we have a, I don't know, I'm going to knock on wood. I don't want to say,

I have been enjoying it. We've been pretty good. I'll just leave it at that. I was doing great, and then I let my heart carry me with U.S. First Belgium. Did you not hedge out of that? I should have hedged it. I didn't. You didn't hedge that 24 to 1?

Did you tell America that you had a 24 to 1 ticket, a four-leg parlay, and the first three legs hit? Yeah. And then you even put into the thread, the hedge, and Dubondo told you just wait until after it was Spain was the third leg. Right. And then you were set up for a perfect head. Spain one in regular time.

An amazing hedge. It would have been a giant winner for you. This is why I'm stupid. But this is why I'm stupid. Oh my God. It's a freaking USA soccer. I'm sorry. There's no such thing as bad karma.

They stink. They put a 38-year-old dude with a man bun. This is the thing. I'm not going to go do the rant. I do understand where everybody's coming from in terms of the rebuttals to the idea that our best athlete, if we had our best athletes, we'd be better. And then there's a lot of rebuttal. There's a different thing.

to it, the skill set, developing the skill set. I do feel like, I asked this on the pod this week, where would you put Tim Ream in terms of American athletes right now? I'll give you the over-under, 5,000 fucking athletes in the United

States of America. Is this guy inside the top 5,000 U.S. athletes at the moment, or no? See, I don't blame Tim Ream because I don't think he probably even deep down wonders why he's the sweeper when he's 38 years old.

He's 38 years old and he was our best guy to be one of our three guys who we have back to stop all bad things that can happen against the best countries of the world. So this is the problem when you win guys say, well, there's a fair rebuttal like the skill set that gets developed whatever. This dude's 38 freaking years old. He's a big man, but the 6'4 guy from Belgium just jumped over him. Like what? Well, the other issue is I went back.

I was going through. I was bummed out after we lost. I was going through the 2002, the run they had. Yeah. Where they beat Mexico and then Mexico started cheap-shodding everybody in the last 50. It's unbelievable. One guy has like a flying headbutt. Like he's in blood sport.

Vasquez gets kicked out. But then we lose to Germany on a handball play. We lose one-nothing. We actually score a goal that hits the German guy's arm and they don't call it. It would have been called the goal now with the VAR. Yeah, yeah. We lose one-nothing. But that was, you know, when we talk about like best American teams, that's clearly the best team we've had.

That team was actually like, you know, going toe to toe. But when you think about the reasons they were going toe to toe, they had a bunch of tough motherfuckers in that team. And that's what when I think about like the World Cup, I've been watching all these other teams, how feisty everybody is now. There's a nasty side to these things. Did you feel like we had a nasty side? Because I didn't see that at all. We have some great tough athletes. I think.

But do we have, do we have nasty side? Dres. Freeman, who do you want to be nasty? I'm just saying, like, we need to send our team to nasty camp. Because all these other teams, they're pulling arms. They're pulling jerseys. They're throwing elbows. They're starting shit.

So this is the challenge, right? This is the physicality you're describing. We've seen this. This is why there is, you know, this instinct to go to, what if we got our, our better athletes out there? It's not the athletes. It's the style. When you, it's my eyes.

When my eyes see Tim Rie and I think you're right. Yeah. Fall down every time somebody touches him. I've seen, I've been watching fucking football. I've been watching college football. I mean, you know, these guys don't get tipped over. Or Jalen Brunson.

They don't get knocked off the ball. Jaylen Brunson got knocked down. He just gets up and he's like this tough little dude. And also can't get really knocked off the ball. Right. There's plenty of physicality and he can't get knocked off of it. That dude, desks. The fuck is that guy.

Well, I was thinking. the 2022 finals that we went to those games, Warriors Celtics, and the Warriors basically big boyed the Celtics and the Celtics kind of didn't know how to fight back and got pushed around and all. That's kind of what the U.S. is like in the World Cup every four years.

Feels like these teams, Belgium, big boyed us, you know. And Trump danced us in the locker room after the game. Like that. So I got to, it's not just a Tim Riem. Obviously they had some holes. There was, you know,

some speed on the sides. and then can we get an awesome somebody who's a stopper? I mean, upon reflection, we had, we were sort of lulled into a misunderstanding around what this team's true caliber, potential, you know, the true outcome. Yeah, when you hear like people like the Bundo and CR and these people that watch Premier League and the Liga

and all these dudes and these other teams have all these guys that, you know, like that number 10 on Bundo, Belgium who's on Arsenal and is awesome. I don't watch a lot of Arsenal. But they have all these dudes who have been in just big games all year. Right. And our guys, you know, so I don't know. There was a little bit of an optical illusion. I still enjoyed the ride. I had a great time. It was really fun. Enjoyed it thoroughly. But yeah, it's, it's, this is probably where we're going to max out all the time around around a 16th. Maybe so. Unless we get some. I'm okay with it. I'm only interested once every four years. How is good luck with DeBonson, Peterson. Big night tonight.

I hope your guy, AJ shows up. Thanks for... He's going to show up. You know, Peterson's going to look awesome. Everybody get prepared for that. All right. I'll talk to this week. Thanks, buddy.

All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to House. Thanks to Gahau and Eduardo. As always, don't forget, Ali, rewatchables. That is up. She's the one and Hitch are the next two coming. And I will see you at some point on Sunday live on Netflix. Enjoy the rest of the week.

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